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27.1.15

24.1.15

I have known Marco Munoz Jaramillo for forty-six years, long before he was an "Artist" and I was a "poet." These designations still feel uncomfortable to me-- somewhat like the shirt tags that annoyed me as a child, and so I look at Marco's paintings and photography both through the lens of shared experience, but also with a knowledge of line and eye peculiar to my chosen medium: Both Marco and I use space, and create the illusion of movement through stillness. What first struck me about the bicycle series was how the lines and colors, painted on plywood, had both a sense of futurity and of the past moving simultaneously-- so that the present sort of "Wobbled," became unstable both in playful yet disturbing ways. Beauty was placed by the philosopher Averroes under the category of the grotesque. He saw beauty as distortion in so far as it is rare, and always contains an element of strangeness (what differentiates it from the merely pretty). There is nothing pretty in Marco's art., but there is surpassing beauty. He, like William Blake, knows that exuberance is a form of beauty that both transcends and uses the energy of nature without having to hold a slavish mirror to it. These bicycles manage to exist both as acts of the imagination and as tributes to what Marco Munoz Jaramillo’s wonderful eye has directly seen. They wobble and waver as if distorted by the heat of the day, yet, as the poet Roethke wrote of himself, they remain, "stable in their instability." Marco creates both the anciently sudden and the suddenly ancient, but devoid of nostalgia. This series is no sentimental journey to a bygone era, no turn of the century looking back to another turn of the century. Rather, it is the common ground where all transitions meet: in the energy with which we move both through line and color to some sense of the "made thing"-- made, as William Carlos Williams suggested by "defective means: " These bicycles achieve presence. They can not be reduced to either representation or to mere distortion. They have a life and inner necessity of their own and it will not be taken from them.

Joe E Weil, poet, assistant professor at Binghamton University, author of the Great Grandmother Light, poems new and Selected